Instagram test feature lets users share Stories straight to Facebook

To boost the popularity of Stories, Facebook could turn to its photo-centric sister app. In a new feature test first spotted by the Next Web’s Matt Navarra and Twitter user @mruiandre, some users are seeing an option to share Instagram Stories directly to the main Facebook app. Instagram has since confirmed that the feature is indeed in testing.

Facebook added its own version of Stories earlier this year, but the feature hasn’t taken off with the same gusto as its Instagram counterpart. The company could solve that problem by mixing Instagram content into Facebook itself, as users seem perfectly happy posting on-the-fly photo and video updates to the photo-sharing app.

The move would be an interesting intermixing of content between the two apps, which have remained mostly separate (much to the relief of Instagram loyalists) since Facebook first bought Instagram back in 2012. Instagram users have been able to share individual photo and video posts to their Facebook News Feeds for a long time now, though no content travels the other direction.

Instagram Stories already has aggressive placement in its own app, appearing on a separate bar above normal Instagram posts. The company added the Snapchat copycat feature back in August 2016 and the feature’s popularity is likely largely the cause of Snapchat’s slowed growth in 2017. Since that whole Instagram Stories thing appears to be going so well, porting it over into Facebook proper isn’t a bad idea — it’s just another benefit of having a whole suite of apps that you can pick and choose from in order to fine-tune the main money-maker.